iPad, the new product from Apple

trebleclick.blogspot.com reports:

Apples latest product was a "secret" known by everybody. The Net will be flooded with detailed information, but our objective is very different. So, to summarize, we are providing you the most relevant Apple iPad facts:

iPad is a mini-netbook Table with a multi-tactile LED screen of 9.7 inches, a screen resolution of 1024x768. Depending on the model, you can also use WiFi and 3G connections, with capabilities of 16, 32 and 64 Gb. iPad price ranges between 500$ and 700$.

The surface of the iPad measures 24 x 18 cm, and has a width of 1.34 cms. (that's 9.45 x 7.09 x 0.53 inches). It weighs around 680 gr. (WiFi version) and 730 gr (3G version), with a non-removable internal battery with a duration of 10h of video and WiFi usage.

Inside the iPad is an Apple A4 processor of 1 GHz, whose microprocessor integrates a graphic processor with video support up to 720p at 30fps in H.264.

iPad runs on the same operative system than the iPhone, and the old iPhone apps will be adapted for iPad with no additional cost for the users who already purchased such aps at the Apple store.

Haloscan comments closes at 10th February 2010

The blog comments service haloscan.com, closes the next 10th of February 2010.

According to Haloscan sources, a physical failure of its system forces them to close their commenting service. They provide 2 different alternatives:

Exporting your existing blog comments, so you can import them in a different commenting service.

Migrating your account to Echo, a different comments system which is not free, probably owned by Haloscan.

According to this second Haloscan migration option, they seem no to have no physical system failure that forces them to cut off the service. It all seems to be a rude justification to discontinue their current commenting service and then charge for the same service. Of course they have the right to do so, but their commenting service was somehow limited, with even less features than other free blog commenting services.

These kind of practices betray in some way user's confidence. They decided to start at some point with a free blog commenting system (well, not completely free, let's remind that you accepted such service in exchange to including advertisements in your own blog comments window), and in the long term they have to face this closing situation. Let's see whether an important drop in their number of users teaches them a lesson.

If you are a user of haloscan.com and you want to keep your previous blog comments, we suggest you to backup such comments before the closing deadline.

What are Google Analytics notes?

Google Analytics has a new feature that allows you to create notes for your statistics. With Google Analytics notes you can attach a description or a comment to any date in your graph. It is just a matter of clicking a point in your graph, and then, writing down your annotations.

Why are Google Analytics notes so important?

This feature is very interesting because, till now, you had to keep a changelog for any maintained sites. But by embedding notes straight from Google Analytics, attached to specific dates, you can keep your historic of changes together with your statistics.

In a nutshell: with Google Analytics notes you better understand how is your site behaving. And only by understanding your measures you could optimize your site.

The best 5 ways to use Google Analytics notes

Since you can write your annotations in Google analytics to understand perfectly how it works (and being thus able to improve it), now the key is writing only those notes that are really meaningful.

For me, these are the 5 best ways to write notes in Google Analytics:

Write notes with brief descriptions of your major site changes. That is, adding lots of new content, changing the website design, modifying the site navigation, and so on. After all, website analytics were designed to measure scientifically how human users and search engines navigate your site, so you have to pay special attention to strong changes in your statistics from that "major site changes" mark.

Write a comment when any part of your homepage changes. Most returning users don't bookmark inner pages in your site: they just type the address of its homepage. And, of course, most new users are guided straight to your homepage. On top of that, your homepage is usually the main page rank distributor to the rest of your site. So any subtle change on your homepage could deeply impact both your users and search engines. And that's why you should pay attention after the "homepage changed" note in Google Analytics.

Add a new note when any promotional campaign starts. When you put any special effort in a promotional campaign (either AdSense PPC, e-mailing, link building, and so on), you have to measure its impact. Is your campaign worth your time and effort? Does it attract new traffic? Now, you just have to look at your Analytics after the "promotional campaign started" annotation.

Add annotations to your Analytics whenever you publish a new article, blog post or site page. If you really have the good habit of posting high quality content each day, this amount of notes could become overwhelming. Nevertheless, if you just update your contents once a week or less, it is important to measure how your content writing efforts affect your analytics. Check the "new content title" tag inside your Google Analytics graph and discover what is your best kind of content for traffic building purposes.

Write a note whenever you detect a traffic spike in your statistics. That is, when a lot of users suddenly access your site, you register a peak in the graphs of Google Analytics. Finding the cause of such spikes is usually very easy: just look at your traffic sources. It will mostly be caused by a link pointing to your site from a very popular site. This way, these eye-catching traffic spikes won't distract you too much when understanding the subtle meaning of your Google Analytics statistics, now being marked with the "traffic spike cause" note below. And keep an eye trying to repeat such useful spikes.

Starred notes in Google Analytics

Specially meaningful annotations can be marked with a star icon, so you can filter out such less-important notes by selecting the starred option.

My suggestion is that you should try to mark everything in your statistics using these Google Analytics notes, because that will give you lots of fine-grain information. Couple this with the new Google Analytics Intelligence feature and you will be discovering tiny details that can really influence your results.

Nevertheless, Analytics notes are a time-saver feature. If you want to perform a broader analysis than the default last month statistics glance (let's say, a one year analytics report), you won't need lots of annotations - trust the most important, starred notes to get the big picture.

Google Analytics notes are a great way to understand and at glance the results of your Internet marketing efforts. Quick statistical understanding is the key to measure and optimize. So take advantage of this new time saving feature of Google Analytics when tracking your statistics. Use it wisely, following these best 5 ways to use Google Analytics notes